


For We Are All The Same In Death

by AdmiralGodunov



Category: Zero | Project Zero | Fatal Frame Series, Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen | Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 04:51:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15235743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdmiralGodunov/pseuds/AdmiralGodunov
Summary: On Rougetsu Island, there are the Mask Makers, the Ceremony Masters, and the Tsukimori Miko. Their fates have always been intertwined; inseparably, inexorably. A tale of Sayaka Minazuki's connections to all, that which she gained, and that which she lost.





	For We Are All The Same In Death

The Tsukimori Miko. The Ceremony Masters. The Mask Makers.

 

* * *

 

“Sayaka-chan!” the excited voice baubled with the pitter-patter of shoes in the background, and two little girls met in a flurry of giggles and fluttering skirts.

“Sakuya-chan!” Sayaka responded as their hands clasped and the two danced around in a little-kid’s excited reunion. From just down the street, Dr. Haibara strolled calmly toward where Sayaka and her parents waited, his wife at his side, rocking a sleepy toddler in her arms.

While the adults gathered to talk, the two girls ran off into the open park, kicking up little clouds of cherry blossoms in their wake. The first stop was a rock - really only barely taller than either of them, but from a child’s perspective it may as well been a mountain - and Sakuya hoisted herself up upon it with a little noise of exertion, then stood up tall and brushed the dust from the front of her red, red dress.

For a moment, young Sayaka stared at the older girl. It was an age difference less than a year, but even those months might as well have been an eternity to one who had only marked a handful of years alive at all, and so Sayaka couldn’t help but feel like Sakuya was the older, wiser, mature one. The contemplative look the other girl gave the cherry blossoms cemented the image, and Sayaka could imagine Sakuya as the sort of wise old leader she’d seen on cartoons and in movies. It helped there was a melody in the background, harmonic and soft and soothing, just so far out in the range of Sayaka’s hearing that she risked a glance around to make sure it was not coming from a band suddenly struck up.

Then, amber-gold eyes turned toward her, and they glinted in mischief before Sakuya knelt a bit and held out her hand, her wavy hair fluttering about her shoulders in a cool spring breeze. “Come up!”

Sayaka took the hand, and with a little effort, they both stood at the top of the rock, looking out at the majesty of their kingdom, their little park on Rougetsu Island.

“The Kagura’s gonna be here soon!” Sakuya said, clapping her hands together, rocking on her toes. It seemed dangerous to do that on top of the rock, but Sayaka said nothing.

“It’s a whole _year_ away, though!” Sayaka replied, instead, with a groan. A year was an _eternity_ away, and they had to still get the masks ready, and the kimonos made, and the decorations.

Sakuya giggled, twined her fingers together in front of her, and opened her mouth as though to say something, when suddenly she froze. Just as Sayaka was about to ask her what was wrong, a sound, so _wrong_ and _bad_ that it made Sayaka shiver hit her in the back of her mind, and the sound of a woman’s scream pierced into her real ears, and suddenly both children looked back to where the adults all huddled around a thrashing figure on the ground.

“Mama…” Sakuya whispered, and she jumped down from the stone, hitting the ground running to her mother’s side. Sayaka took a step and hesitated at the edge, looking at the long, long drop to the grass and fluttering cherry blossoms, then mustered her courage and jumped off, as well. She’d barely made it down, only to stumble at Dr. Haibara’s voice, deep and booming, and strained with a note Sayaka didn’t recognize as panic yet because she was too young, and she’d never heard it in the doctor’s voice before -

“Sakuya, stay there! Stay back. We’ll handle this…”

 

* * *

 

“On this island… there are the Mask Makers, the Ceremony Masters, and us, the Tsukimori Miko,” Sayaka’s mother said, as she gently ran a comb through the young girl’s hair, smoothing out the straight, black locks, tousled from another day of playing.

“Mm,” Sayaka said, and nodded in agreement, wincing as it pulled the comb into a particularly painful knot. Her mother tutted softly, loosed the comb, and tried from a different angle.

“There aren’t many Tsukimori Miko anymore, Sayaka. You have to remember the melody well. And… you have to listen to the melodies of others’ souls,” the woman said finally, after a few more moments.

Sayaka hummed again, but didn’t nod. There was a contemplative silence, before the young girl said, “Sakuya’s mama… is her song broken?”

Sayaka’s mother paused, then, the comb going very, very still in her hair, and the young girl squirmed a bit in the woman’s lap as the silence stretched into discomfort.

“... I think… there are more things I should teach you, Sayaka. Though I doubt you will remember them all, try to remember most.”

 

* * *

 

The Ceremony Masters, the Tsukimori Miko, and the Mask Makers were all present in the ceremony hall, beneath the swollen full moon. The air thrummed with the energy of the guests and residents of the island alike in anticipation of the coming kagura. It was difficult to discern anyone’s identities from the stage, Sayaka thought, even those of her parents.

_For we are all the same in death._

She wasn’t sure what prompted that, but Sayaka shuddered, and instead looked for the familiar figure she knew _was_ nearby - to her left, not immediately beside her but a bit catty-corner, standing so still if it were not for the motions of her breathing shifting her kimono, Sayaka would’ve sworn she was a statue.

There were a lot of sounds about her, the melodies of everyone in the room, crammed together, overlapping. A single person’s melody was weak, Sayaka’s mother had said, but many melodies together were strong, and Sayaka finally understood what she had meant. Even still, she sought out the particular songs that she knew the best, and when the cue came to strike up the music, to start the dance of the Kagura proper, Sayaka focused on them, let that beat and melody help her play, and the rhythmic swaying of the dancer in the center of the stage take her mind somewhere else.

It felt like… floating. Slowly, at first, a little rising sensation in her chest that swelled and pulled upward. All of them, everyone in the room, upward and upward. Toward the sky. Toward the moon. Without prompting, the music came faster, and with it, the rising sensation increased. More and more and more until a freefall, like she was weightless and eternal, and in the embrace of the moon and a thousand other people, and nothing and no one all at once. Then, something _changed._ Like the string of a koto snapping, some part of the melody shifted, and distorted, and the thousand arms that had been embracing her turned into clawing hands, reaching for her, digging into her mind. She didn’t give in, she didn’t let them in, and the melody she played changed. To the one her mother had taught her, to the harmony in counterpoint to everyone else’s, and the hands abated, everything abated until, for one perfect, serene moment, Sayaka was alone in oblivion…

… and the music stopped, her senses returning to her, like floating back slowly from a deep sleep, the last note fading into the rafters.

She was back in the Kagura stage, the moonlight soft, golden, soothing, and everyone else was slowly coming to as well, murmurs of speech quietly bubbling up amongst the patrons, breaking the rapturous silence. But something was wrong, there were sounds that hadn’t been there before. Worried, Sayaka sought out the familiar melodies, and found all but one.

Sayaka’s head snapped toward Sakuya, standing again in such abject stillness that she may well have been inanimate… until she pulled her mask violently from her face. Sayaka motioned as though to step closer, but a gentle hand at her shoulder stopped her.

It was wrong. It was wrong, it was wrong, it was _bad,_ and she didn’t understand immediately what felt so off. Then, Sakuya turned to Sayaka, away from her fretting parents, and reached a hand up to delicately press fingertips against her own face, across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, as though not sure it was still attached. Tears streaked from under her fingers.

Sayaka pulled her mask from her own face, a hot tear rolling down her own cheek as the sound, screeching metal on metal in the back of a crowded room filtered in. Then, her mother pulled her away.

 

* * *

 

Sayaka shifted a little in her chair, still unused to the glassy eyes of a dozen dolls staring at her from their perches on shelves in the room at Rougetsu Hall. She’d come as often as she could after Sakuya was admitted, and every time it seemed the collection of dolls had grown. They were beautiful, well-crafted and expensive, but they seemed far more _alive_ than they should be, and she swore she heard faint echoes of Sakuya’s soul song out of them every so often. She swore she heard whispers from them, too, on nights when the moon waned.

Today would be a full moon, and so it meant that, at the very least, Sayaka could speak somewhat normally to her best friend. The drapes fluttered in the cool early evening breeze.

“The Kagura will be coming soon,” she said,  never sure anymore how to start conversations with the other girl. It had been ten years, and with every moon that had faded to new, it seemed Sakuya’s condition had become worse. Some days, Sayaka didn’t even know if she was really talking to her friend or not.

“Yes,” Sakuya replied, and there was a note in her tone, something more positive than Sayaka had heard in a long time. There would be a new treatment tried, there, on both Sakuya and her mother, something that the Haibara family hoped would abate the symptoms, even only for a little while. It nagged at Sayaka, on the tip of her tongue, that there might have been _something_ to the desperate attempt, but she couldn’t figure out what was missing.

“Will you be alright?” Sayaka asked, unflinching as she met the amber gaze.

Sakuya said nothing, merely rocked forward onto her feet, lifting up to lean closer to Sayaka. One hand cupped each cheek, and Sakuya pressed a kiss to Sayaka’s cheek, before breaking the gaze to close her eyes and lean their foreheads together for a brief moment of companionable silence.

When she pulled back, and sat silently at the edge of her bed, Sayaka swallowed a lump in her throat, unsure if the sudden sickness in her belly was from the ugly, swollen, pink scars she’d glimpsed beneath the hairline, or the fact that single gesture felt like a goodbye.

 

* * *

 

The Mask Maker entered Sayaka’s life at the Kagura. His name was Souya Yomotsuki and he had a beautiful soul song. It was fated, her mother told her later from her sickbed. After all, on the Island, the three most prominent families always had their fates intertwined.

The Kagura felt strange - light and bubbly, even for the euphoria that was supposed to take all of the participants and observers to the place closest to the moon. Sayaka couldn’t help the warm, elated feeling in the wake of the budding feelings for the mask maker’s apprentice. It was so delightful, she wrote a letter of love to him afterward, and even managed to forget her unease at the growing sound of static in the background of the Kagura.

 

* * *

 

It had been so long since Sayaka had last visited her friend, she was surprised that the other young woman was standing at the window, rubbing the underside of her pregnancy-swollen belly. When had Sakuya become involved with anyone? Last Sayaka had known, the only men in Sakuya’s life had been her father and brother.

She felt guilty, and a little disappointed - when had she missed so much? Been so focused on her own love life to forsake knowing anything about the person she had once considered a best friend?

“Well, congratulations,” she said, and buried her unease under a wan smile. “Who is the father? I haven’t been keeping up as well as I should.”

Sakuya said nothing, merely continued to rub in a slow, back-and-forth motion with her palm, and the magnanimous smile that spread across her features set Sayaka on edge. Was she really that far gone beneath the Getsuyuu’s effects?

… Was the answer really something Sayaka wanted to know?

Sakuya began to hum, then, a quiet, sad little tune that did nothing to ease Sayaka any further. The sound was different, too, in the background. People’s soul sounds did not just change, but there was something so fundamentally different about Sakuya’s, it was difficult to place.

 

* * *

 

But time marched on, inescapable, unavoidable. In the periphery of her life, Sayaka tried to keep an eye on the goings-on in the family of the Ceremony Masters. It was difficult. Through her own wedding to the Mask Maker, the conception and pregnancy of her daughter, time became so very difficult to keep track of, moving so fast and so slow, all at once. What she did know was that she never found out whom fathered Ayako - and the girl looked so much like her mother that it was almost impossible to tell. Sayaka swore for years after Sakuya never had such a truly malignant glint in her warm, amber eyes.

It was an idyllic life she lived, otherwise. She filled her home with light and warmth and music. She taught her daughter to keep the Tsukimori traditions alive. Her husband tinkered away in his workshop on the masks he sold in his stall at the market to the tourists, but always found time to spend with her, and with Ruka, to be an ideal father. The Yomotsuki home was a perfect place, and Sayaka thought the peace would last forever in the little space they had carved out of the tiny island.

Then, it all began to change. The number of Getsuyuu cases began to grow, suddenly, exponentially. But the real change, Sayaka thought, looking back on it, definitely started when the matron of the Haibara family died. Suicide, the word went around; she cast herself from the roof of the hospital like so many other patients before her. Dr. Haibara seemed different, after that, and so, too did You Haibara.

Sayaka wasn’t as concerned with them as with Sakuya, but between raising a toddler and all the other obligations she had, she found it difficult to make time. When she finally did find some, she was rebuffed at the receptionist desk, citing Sakuya was recovering from surgery, and couldn’t have any guests. Despite her misgivings, Sayaka sent a gift and a card, instead, and quietly added that to her list of regrets.

It wasn’t long before the changes to Dr. Haibara seemed to spread further. Sayaka’s misgivings about the hospital he ran just got worse as time went on, and the number of ‘suicides’ among patients got steadily higher. But the worst part were the changes in Souya. He began to sequester himself in his workshop more and more, and occasionally, when Sayaka would bring him meals or tidy up around his workspace, she would catch sight of old tomes, covers peeling and rotting, with worrying titles regarding a ceremony of returning, and a ‘Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’. He became cold, distant, uncaring about anything but his work. She could feel the strain it put on their relationship, but sher bore it as a good wife should.

Then, one day, the unthinkable happened, and Sayaka stepped into the workshop to find Souya pressing a pitch black mask against Ruka’s face. Sayaka felt at once enraged, sick, and worried. Those masks were not toys, were not mere decorations - there was real danger, real harm that could come of misusing them and a Mask Maker of all things should know even better than her the potential risks involved. The startled noise she made alerted Souya, who pulled the mask back, and it left Ruka’s face with a noise in her soul sound like a piano breaking a string… and then staying broken.

That, too, broke something within Sayaka.

The next few months were a maelstrom. Despite her misgivings about sending Ruka to Haibara Hospital, it was the only place with even a shadow of a clue how to help Getsuyuu Syndrome. She slowly began to estrange herself from her husband, making arrangements for herself and Ruka to live in a small house on the other side of the island. The stress began to deteriorate her health - she knew there was a family predisposition to illness, but it onset long before it had even for her mother.

She felt lost, alone, her life collapsing around her, and there was nothing, no one she could turn to. She yearned in the depths of her heart for some guidance or some kind of support, and came up with only one name, one image of a little girl in a red dress, with yellow eyes, standing upon the rock like a living god, a picture of maturity and calm. Was there even enough of Sakuya left in there to seek solace from this turn of events?

It was not as easy as that. Sayaka inquired at the reception, but was turned away - Sakuya was in too bad of condition, she’d been moved to the Isolation Ward several months back as her condition took a turn for the worse. Sayaka said she understood, then pretended she was going to visit Ruka, instead. She was allowed in, unsupervised.

However, getting where she needed to go was harder than it seemed. The Isolation Ward, she learned, was on the fourth floor. There were no stairs she could find to the area, and the elevator’s button was locked, would not depress without a key.

After the third or fourth try at figuring it out, she gave up, walking to the rest area on the first floor, and leaning against the table. That was when she heard it, a calm and gentle melody, soft and soothing and so familiar, but so different, and she turned toward the sound with a soft-

“Saku-" but, instead, found a little girl standing there, a doll in her arms, peering up with curious, sharp eyes. The kind of look that knew more things; and had the eyes been amber-yellow would have been startlingly, and achingly familiar.

“Are you trying to see onee-chan?” the girl asked. Through her fading surprise, Sayaka recognized her as the Asou girl, Misaki. One of Ruka’s friends from the hospital. The doll, too, looked familiar, though she couldn’t quite place it.

“Onee-chan?” Sayaka asked. She didn’t think the Asous had an elder daughter, and it wasn’t parsing that she was speaking of anyone else.

“Yeah, onee-chan, on the fourth floor. I know how to get up there,” she replied, and gave the doll a little extra squeeze. A gentle sound emanated from it, a familiar melody that made Sayaka’s heart ache… and her stomach clench, all at once.

“Yes. I would like to go, if I can,” she said, finally, resolutely, and looked down only to meet the glassy eyes of the doll staring back up at her. They looked far less lifeless than a doll’s should. She fought a shiver.

“Not now, the nurses are still up there. They change shifts in an hour, and the night shift one doesn’t like staying up there. I’ll go get the key,” Misaki said, a mischievous glint in her eyes so familiar it rendered Sayaka speechless, and before Sayaka could stop her, she turned and fled into the elevator.

An hour, huh? Sayaka made her way into the entertaining hall, a million questions on her mind, and an unnerving memory of the perceptive, mischievous little girl that had once been her best friend.

 

* * *

 

It was… all wrong. There were a thousand voices and broken melodies around her, clawing at her mind. The long, winding halls from the Nurse Station into the Isolation Ward felt like a walk more through a prison than a hospital. Bars on the windows, a heavy, locked door… were they keeping Sakuya caged in there like some kind of animal?

Yet, for some reason, Sayaka thought that perhaps it was better this way. With the whirl of sounds of people and things better left silent around her, she couldn’t blame the nurse for not wanting to go into the room, or even be near it.

She opened the door with her breath caught in her throat, and nearly let it out with a sob when she saw what was within.

 

* * *

 

“No one wants to be near Onee-chan anymore,” Misaki lamented, voice awfully melancholy for a child so young. “No one but me.”

Sayaka looked down at the small form next to her in the elevator, and had to double-take that there were two girls, instead. Misaki one, and the other… with such a familiar face, wearing a black and white dress. One blink later, and the second girl was gone, only Misaki’s doll at her side, hanging limply from one arm.

“The doll… where did you get it from?” Sayaka asked, to fill the awkward gap. To keep from thinking too hard on the “conversation” she had with Sakuya... or what was left of her; that which stared blankly right through her head and didn’t even acknowledge her, or recognize her.

“She came from Onee-chan. Her name is Miya,” Misaki replied, and her voice had gone back to a cheerful chirp. “Mi is ‘sea’ from my name. ‘Ya’ is ‘night’ from Onee-chan’s.”

Sayaka said nothing in return against the dread those words sent through her. She needed to focus on Ruka. She needed to fix her life and her family before her health failed.

She couldn’t save everyone. She couldn’t even speak with her best friend. She needed to get off the island.

 

* * *

 

There was something strange, something wrong about the Kagura this time. She refused to allow Ruka to be a kanade in the ritual. She almost didn’t go at all, but, as the only Tsukimori Miko still left practicing, she figured it was the very least she could do to honor her heritage.

Then Ruka went missing. Then Sayaka called the detective from the mainland to find her, and he brought back a shell of her daughter. She could take no more, canceled the house on the island and left entirely with her daughter. The mainland would be their solace, away from the island and its rituals, and the cloying feeling of the soul song echoing from every corner, broken and distorted.

She got the news, two years later, as she laid on a bed in a hospital, every labored breath bringing a sharp pain, a bone-deep ache. A terrible tragedy had befallen Rougetsu Island. There were no answers, just a mass of corpses where once there had been a lively, but thinly populated island. It was a barren no-man’s land she could not return to even if she wanted to.

And as she laid on the bed, staring at the ceiling, she thought with a touch of bitterness that this was to be the fate of one who left an island so deeply ingrained into her very blood. She could not save everyone. Not the Mask Makers. Not the Ceremony Masters.

Not the Tsukimori Miko.

**Author's Note:**

> A simple fic that turned into a monstrosity, based on one little random thought I had during a conversation: "Sakuya and Sayaka are probably about the same age, aren't they?"


End file.
